recent developments

In the fall, my mom gifted me several pots of strawberry plants, and because they do okay with little to no intervention, I have managed to keep them alive. They have started to produce tiny white blossoms, and if all goes well, in a month or so, they’ll be laden with strawberries. Apart from some herbs and a sad looking fennel plant, this will be the first edible thing I’ve grown, and a suitable test of my green thumb. I’m a halfway-decent plant caretaker, but I still do best with the ones that thrive on neglect, like succulents and peace lilies.

Recently, Nick and I have started brewing kombucha. It’s much less involved than I imagined, and all it requires is sweetened tea, a scoby, and a little time. A friend gave us our scoby and we it named Eunice, because that seemed fitting for something so languid and strange. We still need to tweak our recipe a bit, but our first few batches have been pretty close to perfect. I’ve been experimenting with the addition of different fruit purees, and I think the winner (by a slim margin) is raspberry.

Last week I made what was supposed to be a marbled chocolate and matcha bundt cake. In my haste to get it in the oven, I forgot to drag a butter knife through the batter– which meant it turned out more like a color-block bundt cake. I followed this recipe, stirring a few tablespoons of matcha into the white cake batter before spooning it into the pan. It’s not super sweet, which made the leftovers excellent for breakfast. If I were to make it again, it would definitely benefit from a drizzle of chocolate ganache.

I’ve started a new project which involves the use of butterflies, beetles, and moths. It turns out dead bugs are relatively inexpensive, which has made me pretty regretful about all the time I’ve wasted not having a collection of cool insects. The guy above is a yellow silk moth– and can you believe those antennae?! This project will be the closest to art-making I’ve come since graduating from college and I am really excited about it!

Lately I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that my beautiful green sofa is on its last leg. The corners are worn and frayed (no thanks to a certain orange cat), its striped velvet cushions have borne the brunt of several spills, and certain spots have become faded and discolored by years of sunlight. I’ll always remember how ecstatic I was to find it, and how lucky it seemed that it fit perfectly in the impossibly small living room of our second apartment. Because it’s handmade and likely one of a kind, there is little hope of finding a similar replacement (although I’ve spent a lot of time fruitlessly googling “green striped velvet upholstery fabric”). The plan is to dismantle it and refashion the usable pieces of fabric into some chair cushions, but I’ll always miss its first iteration.